It is our strong view that the firm stand taken by NHS England on the question of delayed compliance with the contractual terms covering use of 084 telephone numbers should prevent practices drifting into a fifth year of non-compliance with requirements that came into effect on 1 April 2010.

The necessary change of telephone number takes only a few weeks to arrange, however a total of 1 year's grace was granted, so that practices could perhaps make more extensive changes to their arrangements.

Not all telephone calls that we receive are welcome - if we wish to remain open to contact by telephone we cannot avoid this fact of life. Some calls are rightly classified as simply "Nuisance". There are laws and regulations intended to prevent the practice of making Nuisance Calls - that is what needs to be stopped. Sadly, poor enforcement action means a low level of compliance.

Our view is that very little is needed in terms of new legislation to address this problem - simply a few tweaks, the need for which has been accepted. The focus must be on measures to achieve compliance, including proper regulation and enforcement action by those best placed to achieve compliance. These are the respective sectoral regulators, not Ofcom and the ICO.

The ineffectiveness of Ofcom and the ICO, along with the mistaken belief that the TPS is some type of "service", as opposed to simply a means of indicating a widely-disrespected preference, leads many people to seek to take avoidance action themselves.

Not only is this unnecessary, apart from the situation of those who wish or need to have a call filtering device, it can also lead to worthless effort or expenditure. There are companies who seek to exploit the problem of nuisance calls for financial gain, in many cases overstating the likely benefit of what they offer and in some cases being engaged in outright scams.

Whilst TPS Limited is not itself wholly blameless in respect of improperly raised expectations, it publishes a list of those known to be engaged in offering products and services that are likely to be misrepresented.

We recently appeared in a broadcast of the BBC Wales series X-Ray which covered both a scam service and an ineffective blocking device. Both items are now available to view in a playlist →

Our stated conclusions are that:

• Many companies exploit people's vain hope that there is something that they themselves can do about nuisance calls.
• The only way to deal with the problem is for proper standards of conduct and compliance with the law to be enforced by those able to undertake such action.

David Hickson was interviewed on Sky News to cover the Public Accounts Committee report into Government use of expensive telephone numbers.
Supporters and others are invited to refer to what was said, in context.

See below (left) the latest item of coverage by a local BBC TV news programme.

As the presenter of another similar item cast doubt over the claim that this was an “exclusive” story, we thought it might be interesting to put together a playlist of the 13 items that we have been involved with - from September 2007. (See below right). Not all items include familiar faces; contributions by ‘campaigners’ are often made without appearance or named acknowledgement.

Following the BBC Look North (North East and Cumbria) coverage of a GP practice continuing to use a 0844 number, the practice has responded with a statement on its website.
As this includes the invitation, “Please do not hesitate to get in touch with us if you have any questions or concerns” we have responded with an open message (see below).
We hope that media interest will stimulate similar debate with every other similar, committed and concerned, practice in the same position - our arguments will remain essentially unchanged.